Cheap Octopus (Music) (Gentle Giant) Price

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Customer Reviews of Octopus

I was first introduced to GG through their album "Free Hand" (another album that I recommend.) Great counterpoint, odd instrumentation often including xylophones, intricate vocal patterns and harmony along with pretty good lyrics make this a band you can't pass up.

If you're searching for more than 4-chord rock. If you can handle serious musicianship--Gentle Giant is for you.

Give it a try. Who knows, you might even like it.

Best Work of Gentle Giant
Gentle Giant's music is, as they rightly say, an acquired taste. This gave the band a strong core of dedicated fans, but ultimately drove Gentle Giant out of existence. I have always wondered what they were thinking; you can't produce this kind of complex educated music and get any kind of commercial sucess. More accessible than Curved Air or Henry Cow, less grandiose or cosmic than Yes, Gentle Giant created a sound that no one could imitate or degrade with the exception of themselves.

Octopus is the first part of the three album high point of their spiky career, culminating in Freedhand, and then fulminating on Interview, etc. The tightness of the playing, the cohesion of the vision was never better here. The songs are projections of the players: smart, sharp, and concise. The world of 1973, even with its lack of technology, internet, and globalisation, produced so much good music based on the what the musicians themselves could do, not on drum loops, samples, and sequencers, that it makes me timesick to think about it. Here is an exellent example of has been lost.

Octopus Gets An "8" Out Of "5"
On the heels of the genius of "Three Friends," GG created their most "literate" album - with almost every song referencing a source of such repute - from the romance of Rabelais to the existentialism of Albert Camus to the incisive psychology of R.D. Laing, this body of material is on par with anything Yes, ELP, or Jethro Tull have ever produced.
"Octopus" is GG at their zenith, eclipsing even "In A Glass House" and "The Power And And The Glory" due to the presence of Phil Shulman.
Phil, who quit the band after "Octopus" was the vocal lead who also played trumpet and a spendorous sax. But since his two brothers Ray (bassist/violinst) and Derek (vocalist/saxophonist) added so much to the band's fundamental sonic ideology, Phil's absence was not accredited the importance it deserved. The timbral combinations and tonal blendings of "Octopus" are essential to the character of that album. Phil Shulman's presence rounded out the general presence of GG which could have rendered the entire band famous even today.
So many forgotten bands . . .